A manifesto of lies

The following is a non-exhaustive sampling of certain important precepts one must believe, pretend to believe, or advocate in order to be in the Democratic leadership fraternity, that bizarre cadre of partisan creatures dedicated to destroying President Bush personally as an alternative to devising a coherent, politically viable policy agenda:

Nazi and Communist propagandists were on to something in teaching that if you repeat a lie -- even an outrageous one -- often enough people will begin to believe it.

This principle holds true even if you are guilty of precisely the same thing as those you accuse (talking up Saddam's WMDs) and your complicity is conclusively demonstrated on audiotape and videotape.

When your obvious duplicity in this affair is illuminated by reference to the uncontroverted fact that when you made similar claims about Saddam's WMDs you had access to the same intelligence as the administration, you simply say the president pressured the intelligence community to doctor the data.

When this specious assertion is contradicted by unequivocal findings of bipartisan investigative commissions, you simply demand, with righteous indignation, more investigations.

In the meantime, you also charge that President Bush cherry-picked certain intelligence and deliberately relied on other discredited intelligence in order to bolster his case for war against Iraq. And you do that knowing that it is you who are retrospectively cherry-picking the evidence and presenting it as irrefutable proof that Bush lied.

For example, you triumphantly cite a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) document dated February 2002, stating it was probable that an Al Qaeda informant had fabricated his claim that Iraq trained Al Qaeda in the use of biological and chemical weapons. You smugly point out that since this DIA document predated, by months, public statements by President Bush and his team in which they referenced the "impeached" terrorist's claim in support of their assertion of an Iraq/Al Qaeda connection, Bush had to have lied. What neither you nor your New York Times enablers divulge is that the CIA manifestly didn't agree with the DIA's assessment. (According to "The Weekly Standard's" Stephen Hayes, CIA Director George Tenet, a year after the DIA report, testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee that Iraq trained Al Qaeda in document forgery, bomb making, poisons and gases.)

As another example, you figure if you obfuscate artfully enough, the public will not realize that the infamous 16-word assertion in the president's State of the Union address that the Brits learned Saddam tried to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger is as true today as when he uttered it.